Books Recommended by Maria Popova
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The Republic
Source: "I’m actually gobsmacked that this isn’t required in order to be sworn into office, like the Constitution is required for us American immigrants when it comes time to gain American citizenship." - Maria Popova
Still Writing
The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Dani Shapiro
Source: "[The author's] magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing." - Maria Popova
A Rap on Race
Margaret Mead
Source: "Spectacular and pause-giving in its entirety — the kind of perspective-normalizing read that reminds us both how far we’ve come and how much further we have yet to go." - Maria Popova
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Todd Gilbert
Source: "Explores the sometimes subtle, sometimes radical changes we can make in our everyday cognitive strategies in order to avoid ending up unhappy and disappointed." - Maria Popova
On science, necessity, and the love of God
Essays
Simone Weil
Source: "You will find yourself at once infinitely gladdened by [the author]'s enduring ideas and infinitely saddened by the self-fulfilling prophecy embedded in this particular one." - Maria Popova
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
Source: "A meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught [the author] about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived." - Maria Popova
On the Shortness of Life
Lucius Seneca
Source: "A poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice." - Maria Popova
The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert
Take a Whiff of That
Richard Betts
Source: "Lovely, and profound, and challenge our existing ideas about sensory experience." - Maria Popova
Gathering Moss
A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Source: "An extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life." - Maria Popova
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861
Henry David Thoreau
Source: "A book I continue to consider an existential Bible of secular scripture." - Maria Popova
Desert Solitaire
A Season in the Wilderness
Edward Abbey
Source: "So powerful, so enduring, so fiercely necessary today." - Maria Popova
6 books